Long Story Bit by Bit: The CAR Retold

Ben Gill

4/28/14

My blog group studied and analyzed the ongoing ethnic and religious conflict in the Central African Republic (CAR) over the course of this semester. Our first blog post began as a general overview and brief political analysis of what even those intimately familiar with the 2013-2014 CAR Conflict consider to be a complex, convoluted, and at times seemingly impenetrable quagmire between poorly-defined and little-known ethnic/religious groups, namely on the torrent of bloodshed between the Muslim Seleka rebel coalition and the predominately Christian Anti-balaka militias. We came together to decipher and interpret a complex and sometimes contradictory array of media and academic sources to craft what we believe to be an accurate, concise portrait of the conflict as of February 2014. Doing this required coming to a consensus, as a group, of what events, actors, and statistics best defined the violent civil strife of the CAR; specifically for an audience that is by and large unfamiliar with the topic in question. 

AA young man cries out after his friend was badly injured by passing Chadian peacekeepers during a protest Dec. 23 in Bangui, Central African Republic. (Rebecca Blackwell/AP)

The group’s second post aimed to provide a more nuanced, in-depth political and social inquiry into the driving forces both on the ground in the CAR and within the Pan-African and international communities. Factors both local and international are playing major roles in determining the course and nature of the carnage that continues to occur in the CAR. We integrated this analysis with a number of key updates on new developments within the country to craft the most thorough outline possible for our readers. Needless to say, the violence that has come to define the CAR over the past few years in the in the collective conscious of the outside world rages on as I type this sentence. Thus far, the efforts off African and Western nations have been limited, weak, and largely ineffective at quelling the violence or the intensity of it. The ethnic and religious divisions continue to deepen according to both civilians and international observers—mainly foreign national employees of various NGOs—and the outlook for the embattled and embittered nation is uncertain at best, hopeless at worst. This conflict has many of the features that have come to define the numerous recent genocides in Africa over the past twenty years, especially the Rwandan Genocide and its’ resulting overflow into the DR Congo in my mind. Sadly, if Liberia, Sierra Leone, and especially the DR Congo are any indication of what’s in store for the CAR, I wouldn’t be placing any bets on success for the nation’s future. However, cynicism aside, there is some hope for the CAR in the form of newly-founded UN peacekeeping mission set to be deployed sometime this summer, named the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilisation Mission in CAR (MINUSCA).

Since I’ve been obsessed to an unhealthy degree by African civil wars and conflicts for some time, with the CAR Conflict being no exception, I was already fascinated and deeply familiar with the general sequence of events that led to and created and current catastrophe that is the CAR. Hence, doing research for these for me felt like something I would spend my free-time ding normally anyway. My research initially centered on contextualizing and translating an extremely difficult to comprehend situation for a class of American college students far removed from any reminder of this conflict’s existence. Trying to make the facts, figures, dates, and subtle nuances of the Central African Conflict relevant to the audience at hand was my most important goal in these blog posts. Hence, summarizing and creating intriguing analysis of the CAR Conflict was my primary objective throughout this work.

An infographic summarizing key dates and figures shaping the conflict in the CAR as of late 2013. (AFP)

As someone who spends an inordinately large amount of time studying the ins and outs of these types of conflicts out of personal curiosity and professional interest, there wasn’t much for me to discover on this topic that I hadn’t already read or come across already. Although, I did find myself jumping even further down the rabbit hole of studying the culture and history of the CAR than I ever thought possible. I even went so far as to track down obscure, largely out-of-print texts on the topic with riveting titles like Culture and Customs of the Central African Republic and Dark Age: A Biography of Emperor Bokassa. Thus, there wasn’t a whole lot for me to learn about the recent details of the Central African Conflict that I didn’t know in advance, but I did gain a much deeper and richer understanding of the nation in question. I also developed a better sense for the level of cooperation and teamwork involved in working effectively as a group to form a cohesive unit. In fact, the most valuable take away of this semester-long assignment was collaborating with an extremely intelligent and thoughtful group of like-minded students.